Denise Williams on Interrogating “Guilty Pleasures”

In this week’s episode, Joce talks with Denise Williams about her latest novel, The Fastest Way to Fall, which is out from Berkley Romance.

From the episode:

Joce: Speaking of—kind of rewinding a little bit—I feel like another moment in the book like we talked about before is that we’re debunking the phrase “guilty pleasures” when we speak about food and reframing them as comfort foods. Why were these things important for you to include?

Denise: You know, that is something that, honestly, I learned from somebody else when I was doing editing. I had the whole thing. And she was talking about, “Here’s my guilty pleasure food, and here’s why I’m going to eat it anyway.” And I don’t think the message was bad. But my friend was like, “Well, you know, how are you using that word? Could she interrogate that?”

And it’s honestly something I had never thought about. And I would have plenty of foods that I would have called my guilty pleasure foods. And I don’t know if I felt guilt on a level that I really felt bad about it. But I did look at that food as like, well, I’ll feel guilty about it later when that happens. And so once I got that view from my friend, I started thinking about how many of us just think about that and then use that terminology and really don’t think about the meaning that it describes.

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